Jonathan Elphick – författare

Explore the wonders of the avian world with this comprehensive and fully illustrated guide to every aspect of bird life. Highly respected ornithologist and wildlife expert, Jonathan Elphick, begins by defining the distinguishing features of birds before going on to describe their evolution since the age of the dinosaurs. With the aid of fact boxes and clear photographs, he then explores in greater detail each of the significant elements of bird life: bird biology including anatomy, walking and swimming, plumage, calls and songs; flight techniques and styles; food and feeding; bird lifestyles and social relationships; breeding, growth and development; bird geography and habitats; and the mysteries of migration. He also considers human attitudes towards birds through the ages. With special photography from award-winning wildlife photographer David Tipling and many other top bird photographers, this book is a unique insight into the world of birds and essential reading for all ornithologists, bird watchers and natural history enthusiasts.

This beautiful box set is drawn from the unrivalled collection of images at the Natural History Museum, London. It includes exquisitely crafted works from some of the most famous natural history artists ever published including Audubon, Gould, MacGillivray and Bauer. They are complemented by Jonathan Elphick's detailed text, which interweaves ornithological science, art history, biography and travel to create a vivid picture of the lives of both the artists and the birds they painted. Jonathan Elphick's book is accompanied by 36 stunning frameable prints (333 x 260 mm), pictured below, which have been reproduced directly from the original artworks held by the Museum.

Jonathan Elphick tells the remarkable story of the development of bird art through the centuries. The book features early, skilfully executed but often fanciful images of birds, scientific illustrations produced during the ages of exploration, and modern approaches capturing the essence of these freest of all creatures. This reduced size edition is chunky yet portable, and retains the lavish finish of the original gift book. The outstanding selection of images from the unrivalled collection at the Natural History Museum includes exquisitely crafted works from some of the most famous bird artists ever published including Audubon, Lear,MacGillivray and Gould.

LONGLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR ILLUSTRATIVE BOOKS 2025In 1786, the renowned Austrian natural history artist Ferdinand Bauer travelled to Italy and the Levant with his employer John Sibthorp, Oxford Professor of Botany. The exquisite watercolours he subsequently created from meticulous drawings made during the trip are among the finest examples of natural history illustration. Bauer’s botanical paintings, published eventually in the unrivalled Flora Graeca, are well known. But this extraordinarily industrious artist also made stunning illustrations of over a hundred different bird species, only a very few of which have been published until now. A general introduction describes Bauer’s early life and achievements, and his experiences of travelling for fifteen months, often facing perilous conditions due to adverse weather, illness, bandits and pirates. It also details his method of recording the precise colours of the birds on his pencil drawings in the field by employing his remarkable scheme of colouring by numbers, each representing a specific hue, to be used as reference when he returned to Oxford to prepare the watercolour paintings. Each illustration is reproduced here alongside a facing page of vivid expert text describing the characteristics of each bird, interwoven with aspects of their ornithological and cultural history as well as comments on Bauer’s depictions. Not widely seen since they were painted some 230 years ago, and now reproduced in their entirety, these beautiful paintings represent one of the finest collections of late eighteenth-century ornithological art.